Chainsaws and flamethrowers inspired the sounds for Kylo Ren's voice and lightsaber in 'Star Wars'

Star Wars
When the first teaser trailer for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" arrived, fans were introduced to Kylo Ren, the saga's newest villain. They instantly started poking fun at the three-pronged design of Ren's lightsaber.

Little may fans know, but chainsaws were one of a few inspirations the sound team used to bring Kylo Ren's character to life.

Ahead of the film's Blu-ray release, Tech Insider spoke with "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" supervising sound editor Matthew Wood to find out what went into creating the sounds for Kylo Ren's menacing voice and his rustic lightsaber.

"Coming into it, [director] J.J.'s [Abrams] direction on that, he just sort of gave us what the character was about early on. The character has an unfinished quality," Wood says. "He's not this polished villain that's seen it all. He's early in his dark side conversion, and so the way that his lightsaber was put together is not the way that a Jedi's lightsaber might have been put together."

Wood says that the sight of the lightsaber prop made it feel like something thrown together. The prop itself had piping traveling up the side of the hilt from the bottom to top. The lightsaber emits a lower, deeper crackling than other lightsabers before it.

A toy version of Kylo Ren's lightsaber, from Hasbro, shows off the intricate piping on the character's lightsaber.
Hasbro

"It looks like it was put together by an amateur," says Woods. "It sputters when it turns on, so the sound we wanted to have that unfinished kind of sputtery electric quality. And, also, menacing. We wanted it to sound dangerous — like you turn this thing on and it could explode in your hand. It's not something that's polished in any way. So when he's holding it up against, right there, intimidating Rey with it, right near her face, it's really going to have a threatening quality."

Kylo Ren and Rey dueling during the climactic battle in "The Force Awakens."
Disney/Lucasfilm

"The same with the sound of his mask and the sound of his voice, that was something that J.J. really wanted to have be intimidating because it's not a mask that's keeping a character alive like in the case of Darth Vader," he says. "It's just purely viewed as an intimidation factor."

Disney

Wood says that Abrams had a few suggestions when it came to nailing Kylo Ren's character.

"It was funny that the adjectives and the objects that J.J. [gave] me for Kylo Ren's voice, you could say, 'It needs to sound like a chainsaw. It needs to sound like a flamethrower. It needs to sound like a Harley Davidson.'" he says. "I would literally take some of those things and incorporate that into the sound process."

Wood said the team also worked closely with Kylo Ren actor Adam Driver ("Girls") to get his altered voice just right.

"From a sound perspective, we got to work really early on with Adam Driver. Since he's such a method actor … I wanted him to be able to hear what his voice would sound like in that mask as he's performing it," explains Wood.

"The processing that I did to his voice, I did live and it would feed back into his headphones so he could hear it and really own the character and get up in the microphone and give his performance in a way that would be a direct response from our technical manipulation as it's happening. Something, for him, as an actor, that's really helped him and helped make his performance be that weird sort of, not just traditional, bad guy voice villain thing. It was multi-layered. It was vulnerable. It was creepy. It was unsettling and I think that's kind of what we wanted to do."

When asked if they took an actual chainsaw out to get the sounds just right, Woods said, "That particular track, yeah, I believe that was done."

"We wanted to have that low frequency. The original lightsabers in the films are live bit range and high frequency so adding that low component … we wanted to put our mark on it for a new generation of Sith … of dark side," he says. "Going out in the field and recording is always something that is a huge thing that we do at Skywalker Sound. We like to go and get hands-on experience with things out in the real world and bring those back and bring that into our sound design process. So, it is more of an organic field of things. 99% of what you hear in the movie theater that we put in there is sourced from something in the real world and not mystified. There's just a grittiness to it, a reality to it, that lends itself to 'Star Wars' as well. Everything looks like it's had a used quality to it. It's got a real-world quality and we want the sound to complement that as well."

"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is available on Blu-ray and digital HD.